Page 627 - Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer - Vol. 1

Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer 607
of the West, there was a 1970s “spin.” The GLBT reaction to the attacks
by Bryant and Briggs galvanized gay liberation and drove us to change its
character from fun “gay liberation” into serious “gay politics.”
In California late in 1977, conservative Orange County state senator
John Briggs, emboldened by Ronald Reagan’s two terms as governor of
California, began tub-thumping “Proposition 6: The Briggs Initiative”
that intended by law to ban gays from teaching in any public school.
Also mentioned in this review-essay is “avowed heterosexual Ed
Davis” who was the chief of police in Los Angeles. In the Swinging 60s
and the Titanic 70s, the Fascist Davis famously deployed his LAPD cops
as some kind of New Wave Brown Shirts to terrorize and raid innumer-
able gay bars, baths, and to destroy the LA publishing base of Drummer
magazine.
April 10, 1976, was a defining moment for Drummer and homomas-
culine culture when Davis busted Drummer for hosting a “Slave Auction”
for charity. This social event was about as sinister as a church auction, but
Davis, planning his attack long before the event occurred, characterized
the glamorous evening as some kind of medieval sex orgy of queers.

In my opinion, 1) the LAPD police attack and raid on the Drummer
Slave Auction (April 1976) is a West Coast version — in fact, a Keystone
Cops version — of 2) the NYPD attack on the Stonewall Bar seven years
earlier (June 1969), and both prefigure 3) the SFPD attack on gays on
Castro Street the night of the White Night Riot in San Francisco (May
21, 1979).

These three police attacks connect the dots of major physical battles
in the new American civil war between homophobe citizens and homo-
sexual citizens. Some call it a culture war. I think this war is the same as
the unresolved issues of the Civil War (1860-1865) which was about states’
rights, the Constitution, and human rights vis a vis slavery wherein, by
extension to our day, the state of being Black stands in for the state of being
homosexual by nature.
Being born Black is no more a choice than being born gay. You know
homosexuality is not a choice when your dreams, over which in sleep you
have no control or choice, are gay.
(Tell me what you dream and I’ll tell you your sexual preference.)
Being redneck, however, is different because redneckery is a choice.
The theocracy of the American South, toting its Bible as a weapon and
waving its Confederate flag, literally believes — in the way fundamentalists

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved—posted 05-05-2017
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